Foreshadowing In Roman Fever

Essay on Roman Fever
The climax in " Roman Fever " by Edith Wharton appears at the very end of the story, however the author, she has prepaired subtly for this shocking ending by using a series of foreshadowdings and hints before reaching the climax.

At the first part of the story, the foreshadowings mostly concentrates on Mrs. Ansley. When Mrs. Slade praised the Palatine for its beauty Mrs. Ansley assented" with so slight a stress on the 'me' "and a small break in the middle of the sentence: "It always will be, to me". And then the next "undefinable stress" on "remember": "Oh, yes, I remember". It's rather easy to notice, the author has hinted the readers that Mrs. Ansley must have had an important and forgetable event in Rome. (p.430)
Edith Wharton, too, has been the subject of a recent revival of interest. It is therefore surprising that the story has received so little critical attention. First published in Liberty magazine in 1934 and subsequently collected in her anthology, The World Over (1936), it is generally considered one of the finest achievements of her ‘‘remarkable final creative period’’. In one of the most recent articles on it, Alice Hall Petry demonstrates evidence of the story's artistic composition, but surprisingly little was done before her article and nothing has been done since to suggest what ‘‘Roman Fever’’ is artistic about. Wharton's genius, it turns out, is moral as well as aesthetic; the story, besides being artistic, is a powerful exemplum about the dangerous susceptibility of human nature to the mortal diseases of the
Rome was the center of a pagan as well as a Christian culture; it remains in the story a place where a choice is made between the two extremes of pagan self-indulgence and fevered passion, on the one hand, and Christian submission to God's laws and institutions, on the other. Nominal Christianity, Wharton shows, is no Christianity at all. In not governing their passions, the two women merely revert to becoming gladiators—sophisticated, perhaps, but pagan. Attempted murder is the ultimate step in their moral degradation, but it does not occur out of the blue; the way Alida and Grace have conducted their entire lives prepares the way. In selecting two such women to be the protagonists of ‘‘Roman Fever’’ Wharton demonstrates her distance from the position that women are by nature morally superior to men. She also conveys her seriousness about the moral standards that women as well as men must obey to rise above the natural human tendency to